Our information age is increasingly the disinformation age. The spread of lies and conspiracy theories has created competing experiences of reality. Facts are often useless for changing minds or even making compelling arguments. In this episode, author Na

Nothing lasts forever.Even the universe has several possible endings. Will there be a dramatic Big Rip or a Big Chillalso known as the heat death of the universein trillions of years?Or will vacuum decay, which could theoretically happen at any momen

The world is a colorful place, and human eyes have evolved to take it in from vermillion red to bright tangerine to cobalt blue. But when we do, are you and I seeing the same thing?Find out why color perception is a trick of the brain, and why you and

T-Rex is having an identity crisis. Rocking the world of paleontology is the claim that Rex was not one species, but actually three. Its not the first time that this particular dino has forced us to revise our understanding of the past. The discovery of

Back off, you Neanderthal! It sounds as if youve just been dissed, but maybe you should take it as a compliment. Contrary to common cliches, our Pleistocene relatives were clever, curious, and technologically inventive. Find out how our assessment of Nea

Owls are both the most accessible and elusive of birds. Every child can recognize one, but youll be lucky to spot an owl in a tree, even if youre looking straight at it.Besides their camouflage and silent flight, these mostly nocturnal birds, with thei

To live is to count and to count is to calculate.But before we plugged in the computer to express this ethos, we pulled out the pocket calculator. It became a monarch of mathematics that sparked a computing revolution. But its not the only deceptively

Every second, lightning strikes 50 to 100 times somewhere. It can wreak havoc by starting wildfires and sometimes killing people. But lightning also produces a form of nitrogen thats essential to vegetation. In this episode, we talk about the nature of t

Poisonous snakes, lightning strikes, a rogue rock from space. There are plenty of scary things to fret about, but are we burning adrenaline on the right ones?Stepping into the bathtub is more dangerous than flying from a statistical point of view, but no

Imagine life without animals, trees, and fungi. The world would look very different. But while the first life was surely single-celled, we dont know just how it evolved to multicellular organisms. Two long-term experiments hope to find out, and one has b